2024
How a Family Law Firm increased qualified leads by 130% and reduced ad spend by 28%.
What do you do when your marketing agency is burning your ad budget as fast as you can give it to them, without care for results?
You take back control, that's what. And that's exactly what Panko Collaborative Law did, and the results - well, they speak for themselves.
80
Qualified Leads
per month.
90%
Subsidization
of my billables.
1
New In-House
Marketing Champion
How Did We Do It?
Let's take a step-by-step look at how the plan rolled out.
Enrolled an employee in the Scaleable Digital Sales Systems marketing workshop.
My workshop is a fantastic entry point for new and experienced marketers alike. In this case, it served as an excellent learning opportunity for the employee as well as a chance to get a detailed, nuanced view of all existing marketing processes.
This allowed Panko Collaborative Law to realize how poorly their existing marketing agency was performing, and to have the confidence to move their marketing operations in-house.
Best of all, my workshop is subsidized across western Canada. That meant that Panko Collaborative Law only paid 17% of the original workshop price!
Fired the agency, used the Canada Digital Adoption Plan (100% subsidy) to receive targeted paid media expertise.
Like so many other service businesses, Panko Collaborative Law relies heavily on Google Ads for new demand generation. Unfortunately, it was clear after the workshop that their Google Ads campaigns from terrible performance, inflated costs, and absent management (also like so many other service businesses...). The costs of these campaigns, combined with their lack of results, were becoming a major source of concern for the team.
With my help, now as a consultant rather than a teacher, the internal marketing champion and I formulated a plan specifically targeted to address their most pressing issues:
-
Non-existent Keyword Targeting. The majority of the budget was being spent on irrelevant broad match results.
-
Extreme Impression Share. The prior Google Ads were shockingly running at near 100% impression share, and at near 100% Absolute Top Impression share. In other words, their ads were showing up at the very top of Google, virtually any time any search somewhat relevant to "law" occurred.
-
Astronomical CPCs. Despite a clear and spectacular lack of targeting and relavance, the average cost of a Google Ad click was $13.21 and occasionally reached into the $30's. On top of that, Quality Scores were abysmal, meaning that Panko Collaborative Law was paying a premium for their performance.
-
Conspicuous (at best) Conversion Tracking. A quick glance at the account would lead one to believe that performance was fine. There were dozens of conversions at a great rate and a great cost. However, it turned out that these "conversions" were grossly misrepresented. The agency was double-counting inbound calls and form submissions, and most egregiously, were using "website visits" and "contact page loads" as conversions...in actuality, Panko Collaborative Law was paying upwards of $500 for a single inbound lead, qualified or otherwise.
Brought marketing in-house and REAPED the rewards.
As a result of the above audit, we quickly developed a strategy to address the above issues and handed off execution to their new in-house marketing champion.
Some of the changes that were made included:
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Keyword Match Type Overhaul. One of the easiest changes you can make to an underperforming Google Ad account is to change match types to phrase or exact match. We were lucky enough to have enough search volume to exclusively target searches tightly targeted around "family law lawyer" in their immediate service area, using exact match keywords. Previously, the bulk of searches were terribly generic and occasionally from totally different provinces! Imagine paying $35 as a Saskatoon legal firm for someone from B.C. to learn "what is divorce"...because that's what was happening.
-
Capped CPC Bids. There was simply no reason to be spending $13 - $35 per click. We implemented a much more aggressive CPA bid cap, which led to a 50% reduction in average CPC. In conjunction with the drastically improved keyword targeting, this meant that we were now capturing 2 - 5 clicks (with significantly higher purchase intent) compared to a single click under the prior agency.
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Sensible Impression Shares. It's not necessary to be at the top of Google, every single time a lawyer-related search on Google happens. As a result of the lower CPCs, we went from a 99.74% impression share, across a broad spectrum of semi-relevant searches, to a 59.4% impression share for searches tightly targeted around "family law lawyer". This means that, should they choose, Panko Collaborative Law still has an additional 40% of the market available for capture.
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Transparent and Accurate Conversion Tracking. We started tracking REAL conversions and stopped reporting on useless vanity metrics. Now, Panko Collaborative Law was able to attribute a rapidly increasing number of qualified leads (via contact form, chatbot, and phone calls) to their campaigns, rather than sorting through 250 "website visits" to find 0 form submissions.
By The Numbers
12
Years of Experience
100+
Past & Present Clients
10
Workshops
Every Year
4
Provinces Approval for Subsidies
Every past and present client is a valuable long term partner.
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The End Result
So what happened, and where to next?
Panko Collaborative Law was able drastically reduce marketing costs, greatly increase qualified lead volume, and develop a junior marketing expert in-house.
Best of all? It was 90% subsidized.
Let me be clear - the job is not done yet. It's never done, if I'm being honest. There are still lots of items to improve - those quality scores are still too low, and a better quality score will reduce CPCs and increase impression shares even further. Who doesn't like more for less? Except taxes, I suppose. More taxes for less services sucks. But I digress!
Now Panko Collaborative Law has the capabilities in-house to continue improving their marketing capabilities, and I couldn't be prouder of the work we accomplished together.
Guys, it was a pleasure. Thanks.
Dylan Hergott,
DHMG Coaching & Consulting, Ltd.
